Mark Carney is making an eloquent case for an alliance sidelining the US | Ted Widmer

The speeches keep coming, each building on the previous one, as the Canadian prime minister builds a case for a new world order that has strikingly little to do with the United States of America, the country that has led the west since the second world war.On 20 January, in Davos, Mark Carney proposed that the world’s middle powers do more to support each other, in light of a “rupture” in the global order. That was clearly a reference to the destabilizing policies of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated exactly one year earlier, and had spent most of that year insulting the US’s allies.On Thursday, before the European parliament in Strasbourg, Carney delivered another powerful oration that outlined what a new west might look like, without its most powerful member. In his speech, Carney signaled his desire to build bridges across the Atlantic at a time when the US-Canadian relationship is badly strained over trade disputes and Donald Trump’s kindergarten taunts. The EU has offered to make Canada an “associate member”, and while it is unclear what that means (the EU has no such category), it’s a depressing sign that the US’s historic allies are seeking new solutions for a world in which they can no longer trust the United States – for 80 years, the bulwark of the alliance.That this was a blow to American prestige was immediately evident from Trump’s angry reaction on social media: he called the idea “laughable” and threatened, as always, to impose more tariffs. That will only accelerate the growing trend to pay no attention to him.In contrast, Carney expressed himself with seriousness and purpose. He began in French, thanking his hosts, then went confidently into Europe’s fraught history, exploring ambitious themes that are central to the continent’s identity. He quoted Goethe, and in German no less. The words (from Faust) were memorable: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der täglich sie erobern muß (“Freedom and life must be earned every single day”). With surgical precision, he then applied that thought to specific episodes in the 20th century, including the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956 (when Russian tanks crushed a people’s dream of freedom), and 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and the Iron Curtain finally began to crumble.It was impressive to hear a world leader with a command of history, exploring both the failures and the successes of the past, before a knowledgeable audience. Hungary remains on the front lines of freedom, having voted out the odious Viktor Orbán in April. Carney offered knowing references to the first world war, a conflict that Canadians remember more vividly than Americans do (they entered the war in 1914, three years earlier than the US, and suffered more casualties).He is also drawn to natural imagery; a moving story described a young Canadian soldier who gathered acorns from a French battlefield during the first world war, then planted them in Ontario, where they grew into a “majestic forest”. Today grafts from these Canadian oaks are being replanted at the original battlefield, completing “a profound circle of renewal”.That language would be difficult to imagine in a speech by the US president, who cut down a historic tree on the White House campus, paved the Rose Garden’s lawn, and generally avoids references to nature, unless they involve golf. He also disdains history. In 2018, 100 years after the first world war ended, Trump raised hackles during a visit to France, when he refused to visit a cemetery of US war dead, out of concern that a helicopter flight would affect his hair. The Atlantic reported at the time that he had also dismissed the US war dead as “suckers” and “losers”.Carney went out of his way to say that the new EU-Canadian rapport did not stem from a desire to “dominate others” or seek to become a new great-power rival to those that already exist. But even as he expressed his values, there was a tone of defiance. Repeatedly, Carney stressed the issue of “sovereignty”, and it was not difficult to draw the lesson that Canadians and Europeans remain aghast over Trump’s longstanding fixation on Greenland. Canadians are also furious over the president’s repeated claim that he will make Canada – a larger country than the United States – the “51st state”. These episodes were audibly in the background as Carney delineated the reasons that Europeans and Canadians want to draw together “so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law”.Other misadventures this week reveal how the strategy of demeaning allies is backfiring badly. For some time, Trump has been badgering South Korea for assistance, while scaling back US military support there, and bizarrely claiming that North Korea, a far greater nuclear threat than Iran, is “unthreatening and respectful”. Unsurprisingly, South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, announced on Friday that he would not send troops or military assets to support Trump’s war of choice in Iran.Back in Trump’s America, the war continues to drive up gas prices. That’s in addition to the ongoing expenses created by Trump’s endless tariffs, keenly felt in the very states that are closest to Canada. They include Michigan, a battleground state where families now face the highest tariff burden in the US, $5,600 per household since the “golden age” began in January 2025. It is difficult to see how this ends well for the embattled president, making enemies at home and around the world, less than two months before the midterms. Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, is the editor of American Speeches, and the recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America